Axis History Forum

This is an apolitical forum for discussions on the Axis nations and related topics hosted by the Axis History Factbook in cooperation with Christian Ankerstjerne’s Panzerworld and Christoph Awender's WW2 day by day.
Founded in 1999.

I think the crack down against SA in 1934 changed things. Nazi leader of 1934 Ernst Rohm was an open homosexual being proud of it. He like demonstrated that gays are not necessarely feminine but can be masculine and fighters to. Also many other members of SA were gay. Rohm and his SA were in rivarly with SS and its leader homofobic Heinrich Himmler. Hitler first defended Rohm against critics claiming his sexual orientation is of no importance for politics. Yet after the crack down on SA he started a different policy as Himmler old enemy of SA wanted.

In Germany, the Nazi anti-gay paragraph 175 was in force till 1994. So it wasn't really because of Hitler.

After the war, homosexual survivors of the Nazi concentration camps were not seen as political prisoners but rather as criminals under Paragraph 175, which remained in effect even after liberation.

Under the Allied Military Government of Germany, some homosexuals were forced to serve out their terms of imprisonment, regardless of the time already spent in concentration camps. Many homosexuals were actually re-arrested and re-imprisoned after the war. All were excluded from reparations by the German government.

I think this is also important for this topic. During the purge of SA Hitler personaly ordered execution of Edmund Heines who was caught in bed with his teen or ''twink'' lover. Heines refused to get dressed even after Hitler personaly told him to do so. So Hitler ordered he and the boy should be executed immediately.

WM many times police in Weimar republic turned a blind eye on homosexuality. I do not know about bestiality and child abuse which were criminalized under the same paragraph back in 1871. Othervise you would not have gay bars and magazines. And in 1929 Reichstag committee voted to repeal paragraph 175. The move was blocked because of Nazi rise to power. Yet even Nazis were sometimes turning the blind eye on homosexuality in their ranks until the crack down on SA. Under Nazis and after SA crack down convictions rised by a factor of ten.

In 1935 Nazis changed the definition of homosexual acts to include kissing and mutual mastrubation and also in some parts of Germany like Prussia under Weimar republic old paragraph 175 was not enforced. Police of Weimar republic had an opinion that acts defined as homosexual under old paragraph 175 were very hard to prove. If homosexual act is done between consenting partners and in private that is understandable.

The first legal step historically towards the eventual persecution of homosexuals under the Nazi regime in Germany was paragraph 175 of the new penal code that was passed after unification of the German states into the German Empire in 1871. Paragraph 175 read: "An unnatural sex act committed between persons of male sex or by humans with animals is punishable by imprisonment; the loss of civil rights might also be imposed." The law was interpreted differently across the nation until the ruling of a court case on April 23, 1880. The Reichsgericht (Imperial Court of Justice) ruled that a criminal homosexual act had to involve either anal, oral, or intercrural sex between two men. Anything less than that was deemed harmless play.[12] The German police forces (until 1936 all policing was the responsibility of the Länder governments) found this new interpretation of paragraph 175 extremely difficult to prove in court since it was hard to find witnesses to these acts. The enforcement of Paragraph 175 varied at times, with for instance a major and unprecedented crackdown on homosexuals being launched after the Eulenburg-Harden affair of 1906-09 led to a homophobic moral panic in Germany.[13] Enforcement also varied from land to land with Prussia under the leadership of the Social Democrat Otto Braun refusing to enforce Paragraph 175 from 1918 to 1932.

After the Night of the Long Knives, the Reich Justice Minister Franz Gürtner (who was not a Nazi at the time) amended paragraph 175 due to what his government saw as loopholes in the law. The 1935 version of Paragraph 175 also declared any "expression" of homosexuality was now a criminal act. The most significant change to the law was the change from "An unnatural sex act committed between persons of male sex" to "A male who commits a sex offense with another male." This expanded the reach of the law to persecute gay men. Kissing, mutual masturbation and love-letters between men served as a legitimate reason for the police to make an arrest. The law never states what a sex offence actually is, leaving it open to subjective interpretation. Men who practiced what was known to be harmless amusement with other men were now subject to arrest under the law.